Where Dreams Go
by crossingthewaters
Summary: A girl's story, told through flowers and fairy tales. (Tsuruko-centric)


**A/N: I don't own Anohana or any of the characters.**

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WHERE DREAMS GO

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PART ONE: SUNFLOWERS

She has never felt this way before about anyone.

She has never felt the way that she does staring at the chestnut-haired boy with that smirk on his face, hands in pockets, who is bent over the light-haired girl with a smile that matches her waist-length tresses, bright and beautiful. This must be how a summer day would look if it were a person.

Looking at the bespectacled girl or the flat-haired boy does not yield the same reaction. He's special.

Oh, she tries to get closer. She really does. Her friendly overtures are met with polite but firm responses that, while seemingly friendly, always have the same meaning: no. No, he does not want to talk to her. All he has eyes for is the girl with the long white hair that she can never match, with a smile she could never hope to copy, and a good soul she knows she does not possess. Every time that Honma Meiko speaks to her she is filled with self-loathing, with envy and fear.

Asking her mother about this will do no good; there is no single person that Tsurumi Rika loves. She knows about her mother's endless stream of boyfriends and her inability to be content with one.

So she resigns herself to watching him. Since he does not want to be friends, she decides that she's fine not being friends with him. Instead she makes friends with Hisakawa, with Yadomi, and with Anjou. Slowly they lose their names in her eyes as they become Poppo, Jintan, and Naruko.

But she stays away from Honma.

The five of them form the Super Peace Busters. It's not her idea, it's Jintan's. He's the one that gets them together for games, whose brain works like some sort of clockwork that she can't understand. Menma, Tsuruko, Poppo, Yukiatsu, and Jintan. Friends forever, they cry, as if it were true. But when she looks at them, she sees a faith in each of their eyes that somehow there will be a bond that holds them together.

An inseparable bond that will not break through time and trial and tears. She's had enough of those.

Of course she should have expected that the only other person who does not seem to believe those words is the chestnut-haired boy, who by this time has grown even more reclusive. He still lets Honma touch him and he talks to them like friends, but he blocks each of the rest of them out in a different way. He also gets into plenty of arguments with Jintan over this or that.

Slowly she herself grows apart from each of them. It's a gradual process that leaves even her reeling. One day when she's at the convenience store with Naruko, they get into a spat over nothing at all and spend the next few days mad at each other. When they eventually reconcile both of them can tell that something is different.

"Hey, Tsuruko," Naruko says, twirling a strand of wavy hair around on her finger, fascinated by a ladybug on a nearby tree branch. They're alone in the base because the others went fishing - or at least tried to go fishing.

"Huh?"

"What were we arguing about earlier?"

"I don't remember," she answers honestly, drawing different shapes with a metal ruler in the sand. "Is it important?"

"No...forget about it."

It unsettles her, the conversation, because she can't help the feeling that something has changed between the two of them. Naruko hands her popsicles and treasure maps and cookies that one of the mothers has baked cordially enough. She wishes she could get inside the brown-haired girl's head and figure out what went wrong. What she should have said. Why they can't tell each other things underneath the stars and hang off of logs and look for dinosaurs anymore.

So the next time it happens she is not completely caught off-guard; she tries to employ what she learned from last time, actually.

Poppo is twirling her around like a kite; he's pretending that she's an airplane, actually. She's having fun, laughing and screaming even though her hair is getting mussed and her clothes are probably going to get dirty and her mother will be mad - and then it all stops. He's frozen, and she's affixed in the air.

"You don't like this, do you, Tsuruko?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're not happy right now."

He's never been one for many words or saying things that he deems apparent. In that moment he seems so transparent and earnest that she almost forgets how to speak, out of fear that her response will be a wrong one. Letting people down, she will later learn, is just as hard when you're sixteen as when you're six.

"I don't know," she cries finally, because she really doesn't want to think about it right now. "Let's forget about it, okay?" For some reason she's reminded of her mother and the boyfriends and she shudders and starts to get upset again. He holds her as her world turns upside down.

But just like with Naruko it isn't the same the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. At first she tries to pretend that it didn't happen, like she suggested, but that fails, because she knows inside that it did happen, and Poppo doesn't seem to want to forget like she does.

The last one of her friends is Jintan, and it scares her every time she sees him that the same thing will happen to their friendship like it did with Poppo and Naruko. He notices how jumpy she is around him and asks her what's wrong.

She can't find it in her to tell him what's been going on. She can't find it in her to tell him that his group of friends...well, they aren't really friends anymore.

Because all she has left now is his smile, is his glow when one of his plans goes right, his frown when things go wrong, and his special smile that he says is only for her on the rare occasion that they're caught alone together (when he's not with Menma and a jealous Yukiatsu isn't tagging along). It never fails to pick her up.

So she lies and tells him nothing's wrong and lets herself _drift_.

Does it catch him off guard? She'll never know. She doesn't ask him about it. After that, she really doesn't talk much to him like they used to. Oh, he includes her in group plans for world domination, he smiles kindly at her when they come across each other outside of their meetings, and he comments on her ever-changing range of dresses.

But it isn't the same.

Throughout all of this she gets the feeling that the chestnut-haired boy is now the one watching her as her friendships are crumbling down on her. At first she lets it slide; it's not like he's the one making them like this, right? But her growing unease is something that she can't shake off, because that feeling she gets when she looks at him...

It hasn't gone away.

She wonders if it's ever going to go away.

(It will never truly go away).

And then Honma dies and she forgets all about her ruined friendships and her precocious crush. She doesn't know why she feels so guilty that the silvery-haired girl is gone now, because arguably besides Yukiatsu she was closest the least to her. But for some reason, looking at her grave sends her on a downward spiral of useless, crippling _guilt_ that consumes her. Guilt that she didn't get to know her more. Guilt that every second they spent together, she'd harbored jealousy deep in her soul even when she tried to forget it. Guilt that Honma Meiko was the person she wanted to be but could never be.

The Little Peace Busters dissolve.

There's nothing else to do now that the glue that held them together is - even now, in her private thoughts, not even spoken aloud, it's hard for her to imagine it - is gone forever.

When people ask her what she remembers of Honma, she either lies and makes up some long, winding sermon about how the girl was the greatest thing in the world and how they were best friends forever and how she was such an inspiration, or she lies and says that she didn't know her.

And each time that she tells one of the second lie, she feels the eyes of the chestnut-haired boy (but nobody else) on her.

What it means she doesn't know. To her it means that she shuts up about Honma completely. Any time anyone asks, she changes the conversation topic, leaves, or just doesn't talk at all.

It's a bit of a relief.

PART TWO: HYDRANGEAS

Somewhere out there, there is a girl who does not think that Matsuyuki Atsumu is the most perfect thing in existence. That girl is her, and she's slumped over her geometry workbook, looking for the missing angle if she is given two angles and one side of the triangle.

Was she surprised when he showed up in her classroom on the first day of school, looking for all the world like he belonged there?

A part of her was, but another part of her didn't think it strange at all that the chestnut-haired boy will continue to haunt her throughout her middle-school career and possibly even through high school if she's particularly unlucky. She decides that the stars are not in her favor, and resolves to check her horoscope faithfully from now on (as if it'll help her, hopeless as she is).

The amount of attention that he draws is crazy.

Already there is a flock of girls perched around his desk, chattering to him about nonsense. It's the first week of school; what could they possibly talk about?

She doesn't recognize any of them as having gone to the same school that they all did. All of them five (she tightens her grip on her sleek mechanical pencil, newly bought just for the school year) had gone to the same primary school.

Does it annoy her, the amount of competition she seems to have? Not really. Because unlike them, she knows something about Matsuyuki that she doubts anybody else knows: he'll forever be in love with a girl who was the exact image of summertime, and nobody else has a shot.

Just like back then, he doesn't come up to her and say hello or point out their acquaintanceship.

Since she's not six anymore, she doesn't either.

Middle school is a lot bigger of a place than her primary school was. There are so many people around here that it's easy to get lost. Easy to lose yourself. She befriends a girl, Tomoe, who came from up North and doesn't know a single soul. She pretends that she doesn't either. It makes it easier.

Around the end of the first semester they part ways because Tomoe has fallen in with the sports crowd, since she plays volleyball. It's a bloodless, friendly parting. When they see each other in the hallways they acknowledge each other in some form - waves, smiles, sometimes words.

Her second semester, she's saved from spending it friendless by a tall, slender boy by the name of Makoto who notices her just sitting there by herself one day. He stays for the longest by far - nearly two years, plus summer break.

He is good company, willing to lie in the shallow grass with her and watch clouds and not say a word, willing to suffer through going to the beach her, the one place she gets flustered, what with the unusual amount of herself that is uncovered, willing to come over and help her when Rika is gone and she has to try and fill the role of an adult.

She never asks what keeps him sticking around, and he never tells her.

What he does tell her in her third year is that he loves her. She doesn't know how to respond. Their friendship falls through. And when she sees him in the hallways she turns away.

It seems that he's stayed girlfriend-less for most of his middle school time in hopes of winning her. Within a week of the botched public confession and subsequent understanding of the rest of the girls that he is now unfettered by the hopeless crush that apparently everyone else knew all about it, he's going out with a willowy model who looks good next to him.

She's been so caught up in her own life and worries that she forgets about what happened to the chestnut-haired boy.

He's gone out with a succession of girls, none of which he decided to keep. He gains the reputation of being easier than most basic life functions. Herself, she doesn't think to try her luck. He'd probably recognize her anyhow. Something inside her is worried about him. 'This isn't what Honma would have wanted' her probable conscious repeats over and over again, the only thing it ever bothers her for.

He laughs and talks and smiles and teases. She can tell that his heart isn't in it.

But even so, when she looks at him she still gets that feeling, like he's her whole world, and she just wishes that for _once_ it would stop. It creeps up on her when she least expects it, like in the middle of the test when she's done and bored and throwing glances around the room and somehow, of course, her gaze lands on that handsome face.

They still don't know each other. He hasn't said a single word to her since the start of the year, hasn't asked her for anything, not even once.

Does he want to?

She doubts it.

While their middle school years were entirely separate, she can't say the same for their high school years. Upon arriving on the first day, she sees him again sitting there comfortably like he belongs. It's a strange phenomenon, how easily he adapts to different situations.

But he hates change.

Maybe he had an epiphany over the summer or something, because when his eyes land on her he smiles and says hello and asks her how she's feeling as if they are old friends. And she can't help but be pulled into his steady (fake) rhythm that has (no) apparent purpose. It becomes a routine. When she comes in, and he's always the first one there and she's always the second, he greets her and tries to make small chat.

His presence is so magnetic that she doesn't realize that it's winter and she's laughing and talking with him. Like they're friends.

For some reason she never finds it in herself to question his motives. It could be that she's afraid to lose one of the few people that talk to her and smile when she talks to them. It could be that she's afraid she's going to jeopardize what she's wanted all of these years.

And then he starts going out with Lina from Class 1-D and she feels foolish for even thinking he could see her that way.

One memorable day, she encounters Jinta while going home from school. This time around, school is only a train ride and a fifteen-minute walk away from her home, so she doesn't need to suffer much. Not like middle school, where she had to change trains three times and still had a thirty-minute walk to look forward to after that. She's on the sidewalk, making sure to avoid the spaces between the square cement blocks that make it up. It's just a superstition and not even one she heard on her own, but rather from the loudmouthed girls that sit in front of her in her Home Economics class.

Still, she focuses on not messing up, since she could definitely do with some good luck and less bad luck.

In fact, she's so focused on not messing up that she doesn't notice him on the sidewalk too. Obviously he notices her, because after a few seconds of standing there and staring, his mind kicks back into motion and he runs after her, shouting, "Hey, wait up, Tsuruko!" Her mind and her legs are yelling at her not to slow down for him, but her heart - and her guilty conscience(?) - keeps her standing there.

By the time that he's reached her she's had enough time to fix her composure. It's strange; she hasn't seen him in a while.

"I caught up to you!"

He's grown an awful lot since she last saw him, which makes sense, because she last saw him at their primary school promotion. In one hand he clutches a fashion magazine, and in the other, a schoolbag. The crest emblazoned on the front of it isn't anything that she recognizes, but it's good to see that he's stayed in school. Unlike Poppo, whom she made the effort to keep in touch with.

Though it is strange that he isn't wearing a school uniform, but jeans and a t-shirt instead.

"Yadomi-san. It's nice to come across you again."

Since he's taller than she, he has to slow his place considerably to keep up with her leisurely one, but they soon fall into step regularly enough, although the way that he's taking such short little steps is so comical that she can't help but laugh. In her head, though. Not aloud. Never aloud.

"Isn't it? How have you been, Tsuruko?"

The completely honest kindness in his voice awakens something inside of her, and she can't do it anymore. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk and just stands there. What's going on with her? Hastily she rummages in her bag for her water bottle and gulps some down, the rush of the water in her mouth jolting her out of her confused state and making her realize that she's acting like a complete weirdo.

Giving him a fake, cheesy smile, she recaps the bottle and shoves it back into her bag, then starts walking again. Even though he's obviously surprised by what just happened, Jinta chooses to ignore it like she did and resumes the conversation.

"I was just thinking, shouldn't we get the group back together? It doesn't even have to be for a...memorial...or anything. It's been so long since we've all seen each other! It's so sad that we don't talk anymore."

"I don't know if they'd be interested in that," she points out lightly. "We're in high school now, about to go to college, and like you said, we haven't talked in a while. We're all different people."

"Well, there is another reason," he says slowly. Just her luck. She'll probably be here all day.

"Shoot."

"I know that this is going to sound crazy, but...I saw Menma again."

And just like that, with the mention of the silvery-haired girl that she'd been hoping to avoid, to distance herself from, to forget her world comes crashing down.


End file.
